Whether people prefer coffee or tea may boil down to a matter of taste genetics.

People with a version of a gene that increases sensitivity to the bitter flavor of caffeine tend to be coffee drinkers, researchers report online November 15 in Scientific Reports. Tea drinkers tended to be less sensitive to caffeine’s bitter taste, but have versions of genes that increase sensitivity to the...

DNA from a 9,000-year-old baby tooth from Alaska, the oldest natural mummy in North America and remains of ancient Brazilians is helping researchers trace the steps of ancient people as they settled the Americas. Two new studies give a more detailed and complicated picture of the peopling of the Americas than ever before presented.

Sunbathing — if you must do it — should be limited to every other day, a new study suggests. You’ll get darker and prevent some skin damage.

That’s because skin makes the protective pigment melanin only every 48 hours, researchers report October 25 in Molecular Cell. Daily sunbathing can disrupt the pigment’s production and leave skin vulnerable to damage from ultraviolet light.

SAN DIEGO — For some people, choosing a same-sex partner may be in their DNA.

In a large study of more than 490,000 men and women in the United States, United Kingdom and Sweden, researchers discovered four genetic variants that occur more often in people who indicated on questionnaires that they had had same-sex sexual partners. Andrea Ganna, a geneticist at the Broad Institute of MIT...

An ultraviolet glow spotted by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft may signal a hydrogen wall that separates the solar system from the rest of the Milky Way galaxy, Lisa Grossman reported in “New Horizons may have seen a glow at the solar system’s edge” (SN: 9/15/18, p. 10).

Online reader RayRay wondered if researchers could see similar walls at the edges of other solar...

Protecting the anonymity of publicly available genetic data, including DNA donated to research projects, may be impossible.

About 60 percent of people of European descent who search genetic genealogy databases will find a match with a relative who is a third cousin or closer, a new study finds. The result suggests that with a database of about 3 million people, police or anyone else with...

Gene editing can speed up plant domestication, taming wild vines, bushes and grasses and turning them into new crops.

Editing just two genes in ground cherries (Physalis pruinosa) produced plants that yielded more and bigger fruit, researchers report October 1 in Nature Plants. Those edits mimic changes that occurred in tomato plants during domestication, bringing the sweet tomato...

Bits of DNA that make bacteria dangerous can be co-opted to bring the microbes down instead.

Stretches of DNA called pathogenicity islands can jump between bacteria strains, introducing new toxin-producing genes that usually make a strain more harmful. Scientists have now modified pathogenicity islands by replacing the toxin-producing genes with genes that, in mice, disabled or killed...

Ibrahim Cissé expected to join his father’s law firm one day. “There were no scientists where I grew up in Niger,” says the MIT biophysicist. “I certainly didn’t know [science] was a profession one could do.”

But Cissé’s parents had a telling clue about their young son’s eventual career path: a door sign he made that read “Laboratoire de...